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Design the cover of my next book!

Dec 31st, 2007 by masukomi

A while ago I worked on The Homosexual Agenda 2007 US Pocket Edition. Well, as the new year is approaching it’s time to put out the 2008 edition. But this year it’s going to be better than ever, because I’m plunking down the money for an ISBN number so that I can get it up on Amazon, and maybe B&N too.

But, since we’re going all out this year, I thought I’d solicit a little community involvement. So, I’m putting out a call to all graphics designers and artistic types. Would you like to design the cover of the 2008 edition? I can’t offer any money, since I’m pretty much guaranteed to loose money publishing this, but you’ll be able to add it to your portfolio and point to a book on your bookshelf and say “I designed that!”

Requirements:

The book is 4.25″ by 6.88″ and the spine is roughly 1/8″ thick. The design must have at least 1/8″ bleed around the margins to compensate for the inherent complications of printing.
The design must be able to accommodate the cover text which will be essentially the same, just updating the year, and probably changing the name of the publisher. Your design should not include any text other than the title.
You must be willing to sign over the copyright to the image if it’s selected.
The design must not be overtly sexual. For example: kissing’s fine, crotch grabs aren’t.
I’m open to totally flamboyant, over the top pink-out-the-wazoo designs or totally straight-laced ones like the 2007 cover, drawn covers are unlikely to win but I’ll consider just about anything. Currently I’m thinking abstract colors and shapes or interesting photography.
You must have read and “gotten” the current one. You don’t need to have bought it. The preview options on Lulu are enough to “get” it.
Submissions must be in TIFF format.
Submissions must be received by January 12th 2008.
Send your submissions to masukomi @ masukomi.org

What you get:

Credit inside the book.

A free copy of the book.

Another item on your resume (if you dare).

The ability to strut around in front of your peers claiming that you designed the cover of a published book.

How will the winning design be selected?

I will look at all of the submissions.

The one I like best wins.

If there is only one submission, and I think it’s decent, it wins.

If there are no submissions or I don’t like any of them I make my own and win by default.

I suspect that the single “decent” submission is the most likely scenario so you’ve got an incredibly good chance at winning if you bother to submit.

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A New Year’s Eve Tradition

Dec 30th, 2007 by masukomi

I learned this many years ago from my first love, and she, I suspect, from her mother. It’s a simple and fun thing that’s always better with friends and family. In the end everyone will have a collage to help them to not loose sight of their dreams through the coming year.

Step one: Gather up all the magazines in your house. If you don’t have many / any get everyone who will be participating down to your local news-stand and have them all grab some magazine that reflect their interests in life.

Step two: You’ll need scissors, glue (preferably glue sticks), and something to mount your collages on. You can cut up cardboard boxes, or go to your local crafts store for some paperboard, or foam-core if you want to get fancy. I think paperboard is probably best because it’s thin enough to stick a push-pin through to mount it to your wall when you’re done.

Step three: About half an hour before midnight stick all the magazines in a communal pile, and make sure everyone has scissors. Start thinking about all the things you want to bring into your life next year. They can be mundane, spiritual, health, anything. Now find pictures in the magazines than represent these ideas to you and cut them out. When you’re ready start sticking them to your board. I seem to remember it taking about an hour and a half, maybe a little more, but it’s a wonderful way to usher in the new year, with hopes and dreams in your heart. Making your collages always ends up being a great social activity. Everyone’s talking about what each other wants in the new year, and how to get there, or why they didn’t get there this year, and those discussions engender lots of interesting tangential ones. It’s a blast.

Everyone gets to see everyone else’s collage, but no-one has to explain what each item on their collage means if they don’t want to. Sometimes the images have very personal meanings.

Step four: Take your collage and hang/place it somewhere where you’ll look at it every day for the coming year: bedroom, bathroom, desk, wherever. Your collage will help keep you on track towards what you really want in your life, and help keep some of those things from falling by the wayside. This is just as important as the making of it.

Let me know how it goes if you try it out this New Year’s Eve.

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Advice for the Movie Industry

Dec 30th, 2007 by masukomi

The Music Industry as we know it is on it’s death bed and while there are myriad contributing factors there are only two at the heart of it: greed, and disrespect.

The Music Industry has been disrespecting the artists to whom it owes it’s existence for years, while painting a picture to audiences that it makes them rich. It doesn’t, I assure you. The few who do get rich do so in spite of the record labels. I think they started really disrespecting the consumers when they switched from cassette to CD. Cassettes, you see, were finicky little things with metal and felt and reels of tape sandwiched together between two plastic sides, so they weren’t the cheapest things in the world to produce, but then we came out with CDs which consisted of one laminated platter of aluminum and plastic, no assembly required really. And yes, I’m oversimplifying a little, but not much. The disrespect came when they decided to seriously jack the price up for the same album on CD instead of cassette. The argument, at the time, was that the new factories and smaller sales volume of a new media was forcing them to jack the price, and that once the volume of CDs increased the discounts from the mass production would make their way back to the consumers. It never did. We knew it was bullshit from the get-go. Now they’re putting stickers on CDs saying that you don’t own the music you just bought, you’re just licensing it. Of course, they’re not willing to give you a new copy of the music you licensed if your old one breaks either. Totally, effing disrespectful.

CD prices are as bullshit now as they were when they came out and artists still are just as financially screwed now as they were before. Then the hackers stepped in and gave consumers a way to get the music they wanted for the non-outrageous price of $0. And the music industry decided we were all thieves. They weren’t entirely wrong, but it’s like Robin Hood, we were only thieves because The Man was screwing us. If the man had of stopped being so damn greedy piracy wouldn’t have become the norm. iTunes is doing as well as it is because it has prices people think are reasonable. [Side note: many artists don't see a penny of digital sales like iTunes because the contracts pre-date digital sales.]

Today I bought an HD-DVD at Best Buy, and since I had been window-shopping HD TVs (yes, i have an HD player but not an HD TV. Don’t ask.) I didn’t quite realize just how whack a price I had paid for the movie: $29.99. Thirty freaking dollars for the movie. That’s $10 higher than the average price for a DVD. Yes, I’m getting more resolution but the process required to get it too me is almost identical to that of getting me a DVD, and thus not even remotely worth paying an extra $10 a movie. Charging people more money for doing essentially the same amount of work, just because you can, is disrespectful. Putting this bullshit end-to-end encryption on HDMI signals is disrespectful because it treats your consumers like thieves, and it’s futile because, as has been proven time and time again, the hackers will circumvent any attempt they make almost instantly.

Before I switched to Netflix I would ask myself the following question before buying a DVD, “Will I watch this enough times that it would be cheaper to buy it than rent it?” At roughly $4.00 a rental that meant I had to be willing to watch the movie at least 5 times, but rental prices are falling now, and movie prices are rising again. How many times do I have to be willing to watch my newly purchased movie to amortize it’s cost?

So please, movie company executives, don’t make the same mistake that the music execs did. Don’t be greedy as we switch to HD media. Charge us a reasonable price, and don’t treat us like thieves. I think that people generally want to do the right thing. We want to pay for the media we consume. We just don’t want to pay a prices that is out of line with the amount of value we get from it. We aren’t you. We’re working folk who don’t have 6 or 7 digit salaries, so the difference between a $20 move and a $30 dollar movie is non-trivial.

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Follow your bliss, then write your tests

Dec 27th, 2007 by masukomi

href=”http://hackety.org/2007/12/24/thisHackWasNotProperlyPlanned.html”>_why
suggests that

…chaos is an essential component of writing code.
The system is too big for you to fathom. So you are always finding
yourself in unfamiliar territory. And once you fathom the system, it
becomes too boring and tedious to pay attention to details…

…Unit testing, in particular, is designed to reel in
spontaneous hacking. It is like framing a picture before it has been
painted. Hacking, at heart, will continue to be something of
spontaneous order, something of anarchy, and the landscape of hacking
is something which comes from human action but is not of human design.

I, as you already know, am a huge advocate of unit testing,
constantly poking my coworkers to get off their asses and cover all of
ours by writing the tests I believe our code so desperately needs…

But unit testing doesn’t have to be an�either�or
proposition, and I am in full agreement with the essence of _why’s
message. Some of the greatests hacks, like some of the greatests
stories, have come from simply opening yourself up to possibilities and
seeing where they take you. There are many good arguments to be made
for Test Driven Development, but when I’m writing the really cool code,
I frequently haven’t a clue where the methods will take me. But that’s
not a valid excuse for blowing off tests. Sure, follow your bliss. See
where it takes you, but, when you get there you will have time to look
back upon your creation while it’s still fresh in your mind and decide
if it’s something worth keeping. If it is, then it’s probably worth
making sure it works correctly, especially if it was written in the
midst of an endorphin high.

And… if, when looking back upon your creation, you think it’s good
enough to share, is it not ever more worth testing, so that your
entirely human errors don’t trip others up too? So that you can be sure
that things really work for others the way you claimed they did? How
inconsiderate of your fellow men would it be to foist untested and
potentially buggy code upon them?

There is no binary in this world; not in code or computers. Beauty and
motion lie not within the ones or zeros but the infinite layers of
transition between them.

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Browser wars? Yes please.

Dec 22nd, 2007 by masukomi

There have been a number of recent articles by smart people suggesting that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the browser wars returned: “The W3C Cannot Save Us”, “Do we need a return to the browser wars?”, “Reigniting the browser wars”, The future of web standards. In that last one James made a simple statement that brought it all together for me:

…HTML went from initial concept to version 4.01 in less than a decade, but has stayed pinned at 4.01 since before the turn of the millennium…

I was doing web development back in the height of the browser wars and my experiences then with browser incompatibility were just as frustrating then as they are now. The only difference is that they were simple and obvious incompatibilities and now they subtle and maddening. Wouldn’t it be better to have incompatibility bullshit AND forward progress than just incompatibility bullshit?

No browser is going to seriously impact compatibility because they all have to keep eating from the same trough (the html we make) and every one of them looks bad if it can’t do a decent job of rendering something the other browsers can. I say bring them on. The only thing that has has driven any progress as of late was the Acid2 test which only succeeded because it made it very simple to understand just how broken peoples browsers were when it came to CSS. Acid2 caused a minor flare up in the war were all the browsers started competing to see who was better and who could get it working first.

I’m all for the various browsers continuing to work towards rendering the same HTML in the same way. This is something we need that benefits everyone, but the fact of the matter is that we’re still not there, and it doesn’t have to be an either or situation. You can add new features, support for new tags,client side database storage, whatever, without sacrificing compatibility on features all the browsers share. And there’s no reason we have to wait for some glacially paced committee to come up with the features. Screw that. There are some brilliant people working at the various browser companies.

The only thing I ask is that if there’s an existing technology in play that can accomplish what you want use it, or work to improve it, don’t try and replace it with something that’s very similar in end result, but totally incompatible (I’m looking at you Microsoft). SVG and Silverlight are the most current example that comes to mind. I will readily admit that Silverlight has some excellent features that totally exceed what SVG can do, but in the end they’re both tools to render vector based graphics you can animate. Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone if the people who worked on Silverlight had of instead spent the same time and energy improving SVG and JavaScript to a point where it could do everything they wanted? Microsoft could have looked Bad Ass for doing this cool thing with SVG and JavaScript than no-one else could touch yet but it would have been available for all so that they’d get the benefit of looking cooler than everyone else and have it shortly followed with the benefit of being compatible with everyone else.

I’d rather have the rocky road of progress than this slow descent into stale conformity.

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The winter solstice

Dec 22nd, 2007 by masukomi

The winter solstice happened today at 1:08 AM EST.

There are a variety of traditions that have grown up around it. In recent years I’d let religious practices fall by the wayside, and with it my solstice traditions, and that’s something I regret. But, the winter solstice is a time of new beginnings, just like new moons. The one thing that’s been a part of my Yule celebration as long as I’ve practiced them is a prayer for new beginnings. Taking a moment to make a conscious effort to set things in motion. The biggest thing for me this year is new relationships. More close relationships with people I can call friend, and maybe someone who would be more. And a renewed relationship with the divine. There was a time in my life when I could feel the ebb and flow of magic but I have unintentionally distanced myself from that connection and I miss it deeply. I’d like to start rebuilding that connection, and opening myself back up to the beauty and energy that surrounds us all.

To the people who have come into my life recently and are on their way to becoming close friends: thank you. I appreciate you more than you know.

To the friends I have had for years: thank you. I appreciate you more than you know.

To the friends I haven’t met yet: I look forward to getting to know you.

To the people who have adopted me into their extended families: thank you. You have no idea what that means to me.

To the family I have lost: I miss you, and while my memory is poor, I will strive to never forget you. I hope we meet again in the next turning of the wheel.

Happy Yule,

Merry Christmas,

Happy Hanukkah,

And every other holiday that happens around this solstice.

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The ultimate Continuous Integration Server Display?

Dec 17th, 2007 by masukomi

Imagine, for a moment, a continuous integration server that’s tied to a collection of Ambient Orbs. One orb per-project. Now. Take each of those orbs and place them on top of the cube of the team-lead. As people walked through the office they could take comfort in all the glowing green orbs.

It would, of course, just look cool. But, if your app was broken everyone would know, thus generating more peer pressure to fix it, and more desire for it not to break.

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How I learned to love the Mac again

Dec 16th, 2007 by masukomi

I’ve been torn for a while now. I love the Mac because it isn’t Windows. I hate the Mac because it isn’t Linux. But, what I recently realized is that I had stopped loving the Mac for being a Mac. I wasn’t judging it for what it was. I was judging it for what it wasn’t.

I have two different ways of interacting with a computer. Either I’m coding, or I’m not-coding. When I’m coding, nothing beats working in Linux. But, when I’m not coding I want beautiful UI and creative apps that make me go “oooooh” so badly that I shell out fifty bucks to some indie developer whose worked their ass of to create a really beautiful tool that works well. And no OS comes even close to what OS X offers in that regard. After upgrading to Leopard I’ve started using Safari instead of Firefox because the new in-page find functionality is so damn beautiful (and, as a browser it’s just short of a billion times faster). From an OS perspective there isn’t much that OS X can do that other OSs can’t, it’s just that OS X has made them easier and put a beautiful UI on them.

When I finally realized that I really do love the Mac for everything I need to do that isn’t code (and even for coding it’s not bad) I was able to more fully appreciate what was sitting in my lap.

And in order to spread that love I thought I might point you to some of the apps that were so damn good as to make me not be willing to switch fully to linux.

In no particular order we have:

Delicious Library

Makes adding and organizing your books and games fun, literally. Current version sucks for sharing though. Next version will address that to some degree.

Scrivener

I’ve looked at a lot of apps to help writers and this one takes the cake. If you’re interested please don’t get hung up on the notecards functionality. The notecards are just one small aspect of what this awesome app has to offer. It’s great for organizing your thoughts and plot-lines, outlines, anything to do with writing a long document. I’m not sure how good it is for screenplays though because I’ve never attempted to write one.

OmniGraffle

Visio is an ugly, ugly, stepsister, with leprosy compared to OmniGraffle. If you’re into making flow-charts nothing beats this app. It’s great for mocking up web pages too.

OmniFocus (a GTD type app that just made the list)
VoodooPad (personal wiki app thing that’ I hate not having on other systems)

I have happily paid for every one of these* and will most likely buy every single major upgrade the come out with too. I’d recommend checking out Transmit (the best damn file transfer app under the sun) too but I’ve been using the command line for file transfers for so long I haven’t felt the need to upgrade to the latest version, and it is something I could, obviously, live without.

*Truth in journalism: I haven’t paid for OmniFocus yet but that’s only because I have until Jan 8th to pre-order, and the current version of OmniGraffle was paid for by work, but I have a personal copy of the last version. And I can’t effing wait for the next version of Delicious Library.

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XBox Live anyone?

Dec 16th, 2007 by masukomi

I’m, not so secretly, a big Carcassonne fan, and I keep playing Settler’s of Catan (although I just don’t understand why). I’m thrilled that these are on XBox live, but I’d prefer to play with people like me, and I think people I know are always better than random Joes. Maybe you do to. Maybe you should ping me the next time you’re online. I’d even be up for a little Tetris.

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Don’t be afraid to look like an idiot

Dec 15th, 2007 by masukomi

The other day I posted a rant about “Alphabetical != ASCIIbetical” which much to my surprise got picked up in a couple places and brought thousands of readers. As with any post that gets thousands of readers, some of them are going to call you an idiot.

…I don’t know what you call this sorting order, but it most definitely is not alphabetical. Maybe you should make sure you aren’t being a dumbass before you climb atop your own soapbox of delusional self-importance. – Dave G. [his full comment, my response]

And Dave’s right, about that part. It wasn’t “Alphabetical” sorting that I was after. I’ve heard it called “Alphanumeric”, “Natural”, and “Lexicographical” sorting. I haven’t a clue what the correct term is, or if there really is one for what I’m looking for[1 ]. I knew going into that post that it wasn’t really “Alphabetical” because numbers aren’t in the English “alphabet”, but I also knew that most people would know what I meant if I called it “Alphabetical”. But does my ignorance of the correct word mean I should have not said anything? Or that I should have written some meek apologetic post saying “I’m terribly sorry I don’t know what the word for this is but you should probably be aware that…” Fuck no! Nobody would have read it, or if they did they wouldn’t really think about it. The fact that that post made it is far as it did was because I was willing to stand up on my soap box and call people on what I believe to be a pervasive problem.

But you know what? I could have been totally effing wrong. Someone could have commented “Kate, you idiot, it’s the Foo.alphanumSort() method and it’s been there for six years. All major languages have something similar.” or more succinctly “RTFM!” I would have looked like a complete ass for telling people they should “be ashamed” of themselves.

But even if that happened it would have been worth it because my ignorance on how to address this problem would have been removed AND I would have a nice trusted library to work with. Plus, because I have absolutely no problem with apologizing when my ignorance leads me to say wrong-headed things.

We are all ignorant of far more than 99.999% of the things that go on in this world. There are just too many of them. So don’t be ashamed of your ignorance. Embrace it. Try and recognize what you do and don’t know, and don’t be afraid to say “Hey, I don’t know wtf this is but I know it’s fucked up.” Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. If you’re right, improvements may result. If you’re wrong you’ll learn how it works. And don’t be afraid to say “I am such a freaking idiot sometimes.” because you are. We all are. It is only a matter of time before each of us says something that’s based in ignorance and makes us look like an ass. But so what? As long as you’re willing to say “Oh my God. You’re right. Thank you! I was an ass. I’m sorry.” It’s no big deal, or it shouldn’t be. If the person you’re talking to can’t respect you for owing up to your mistakes then they’re not someone you want to associate with anyway.

—

I should also note that I didn’t write that post, or any other, with the goal of getting lots of people to read it, but I do recognize that calling people out frequently results in more people paying attention, and engenders discussion. I posted it because I believed there was an issue that needed addressing. And I know there are a handful of people who read this who might want a heads-up, and / or be able to empathize with my frustration. I know that I find it comforting to read other developer’s blogs and see them struggling, or being annoyed with, the same things I am.

This is my soap-box. Sometimes my leaflets are wrong, but I’d rather risk being wrong than never say anything.

—

[1] Looking for: a sorting algorithm that treats numbers in strings as the numbers they represent and not the digits that happen to be used to represent them. 1000 is not four digits that need to be sorted. It’s a representation of the number one-thousand which needs to be sorted correctly relative to other digit based number representations that get mixed in with letters of the English alphabet. See my response to Dave G.’s comment for an example.

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